BE@SUMMER'S: The Story of YY

The March school holidays flew past just like that. Tomorrow is the first day of school for Term 2! 

In this blog post, let me share about YY, one of the children who has been attending Be@Summer's since January 2022. 

YY is 10 years old and has Autism. She has been attending Speech Therapy sessions with us since 2018. When she first started with us at 6 years old, she was completely non-verbal and now, she is able to speak in short sentences. Her sessions were on a fortnightly basis due to financial constraints. However, thankful to the consistent follow-up from the family, YY started talking about six months into therapy!

Sadly... things started to go downhill in mid 2021. YY started to display 'obsessive compulsive' behaviours and compliance in sessions reduced significantly. In every session, a lot of time was spent on behaviour management and little targeted work was done. Her family also started to have a lot of difficulties doing the homework with her.

Towards the end of 2021, when Be@Summer's, one of our Specialist Intervention Programmes, was about to launch, I spoke with Mum about the programme and how it might benefit YY. 

1. Longer sessions - Each session is 1.5 hours, instead of the usual 1-hour speech therapy. This will give YY more time to work on her therapy goals, even if some time may be spent on behaviour management. 

2. Lower fees - The charges per hour is nearly half of what regular individual speech therapy is.

3. Increased frequency - With lower charges, YY will be able to attend intervention on a weekly basis, rather than fortnightly basis. The increased frequency will build a routine for her. This is especially helpful for managing her behaviours. 

4. Work habits - Be@Summer's employs principles of Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA) and TEAACH approach to help a child develop on-seat behaviour and work habits. This will lead increased ability to learn. 

5. Speech Therapy goals - The entire 1.5-hour session is focused on Speech Therapy goals. It is unlike other early intervention programmes where all developmental areas are targeted, leaving little time to focus on the child's priority needs of speech, language and communication development. For YY, her goals include: (1) improving oral motor skills for speech (through oral motor exercises), (2) improving speech clarity (through Oral Placement Therapy and the use of the PROMPT approach), (3) improving functional communication skills (through the use of speech, with the support of a communication board), and (4) improving language skills (through pretend play as well as structured table-top tasks). 

6. Supervised practice - While the sessions are not conducted by our Speech Therapists (STs), the goals are set by them, and the progress is monitored by them. The Interventionists who conduct the sessions are experienced and trained in-house by our Speech Therapists. They are familiar with Oral Placement Therapy, PROMPT, Augmentative and Alternative Communicative (AAC), Hanen approach, etc. Supervised practice ensures quality of our Specialist Intervention Programmes. 

After hearing all these, Mum decided to give Be@Summer's a try. And it proved to be a good decision!

Since YY started Be@Summer's, her progress has been significant! Now she is able to communicate herself verbally, with some support of a picture communication system. 

YY proudly showing off her communication board. She now understands and can use most of the symbols for communication. This AAC system supports her verbal communication greatly. 

YY can also perform 3-step pretend play - For example in bus play, she can perform (1) open the door, (2) Grandpa goes up the bus, and (3) close the door. Pretends play reflects her cognitive understanding of the world. We will continue to build on her language based on what she can understand and then build more concepts and language from there!

As of last week, we completed the 11th session (8 sessions in Term 1 and 3 sessions during Term break). YY now can sit for 1.5 hours with good focus on the various activities presented to her. 

I am so proud of YY and so proud of my team. I will never forget what her Interventionist said during the first few sessions when YY was crying on-and-off throughout the 1.5 hours. She said, "I hope the family will just keep coming and not give up. We will have a breakthrough." With that belief, we did have a breakthrough.